Title of recording: Oral History Interview with Sam Holton, March 28,
2001. Interview K-0206. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)

Title of series: Series K. Southern Communities. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (K-0206)

Author: Jenny Matthews

Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with Sam Holton, March 28,
2001. Interview K-0206. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)

Title of series: Series K. Southern Communities. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (K-0206)

Author: Sam Holton

Description: 151 Mb

Description: 27 p.

Note:
Interview conducted on March 28, 2001, by Jenny
Matthews; recorded in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Note:
Transcribed by Unknown.

Note:
Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series K. Southern Communities, Manuscripts Department,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Note:
Original transcript on deposit at the Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.

Editorial practicesAn audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in
Libraries Guidelines.Original grammar and spelling have been preserved. All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity
references.All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "All em dashes are encoded as —

[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

Page 1

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A] [text missing]

JENNY MATTHEWS:

So, what would you say your role in the Chapel Hill, the desegregation of
Chapel Hill schools was?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, we had four children in the Chapel Hill schools. We moved from
Durham. My wife and I lived a while in Durham after we were married and
we moved to Chapel Hill in 1965. Of course, as a professor of education,
I was considerably aware of the Chapel Hill schools. I had student
teachers in the schools. The superintendent was a former colleague of
mine and a very close friend.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Who was that?

Page 2

SAM HOLTON:

Joseph Johnston. Then when he, when he left the superintendent—I don't
think I'm neglecting somebody there— it was Bill Cody. Who was a very
fine, able, professional superintendent. I was, my wife and I were
active in the local PTA's. I was the President of the PTA, of the Chapel
Hill PTA council for a couple of years. I ran for the school board and
was elected, I believe it was in 1968, may have been '66, no it was '68.
So, the initial steps toward desegregating the schools had started
before I actually joined the school board. They had my, one of my
children had Frances Hargraves as their fourth grade teacher. Frances,
at that time was the first black teacher to teach in a predominantly,
well, in a white school. She was teaching at Glenwood. And we were very
good friends of Frances, and her nephew was later on the school board
with me—Edwin Caldwell, Jr. They were a Chapel Hill family and they
lived in the Northside community. I did, on occasion, do observation
with my undergraduate students in the Chapel Hill schools, both in
Chapel Hill High School, and the junior high school, and then Lincoln,
Lincoln High School, which at that time was the black high school. When
they decided to move to a—. Well, they built a new high school which is
the present Chapel Hill High School. They built the new high school on
Homestead Road.

They decided that they would offer the opportunity there for the black
students that wished to attend to attend. And so many of them decided to
attend that they decided to close the

Page 3

Lincoln High
School. The Lincoln High School—. There is some misunderstanding
apparently in more recent times as to how that happened. Some people
coming in were under the impression that there had been a unilateral
move on the part of the school board, and it had not. I was not on the
school board at the time, but the school board had raised the issue with
the black community as to what they wanted, and the individual parents
indicated what their, what they wanted their students to do. So, that
aspect of it probably was handled correctly. Now, the black high school
was much smaller than Chapel Hill High School. The black population in
Chapel Hill, not perhaps like Northampton County, but the black
population in Chapel Hill was, I reckon about twenty-five percent as
large as the white. Maybe less than that. Over time, there was some
tension among the high school students as the whether the traditions of
the Lincoln High School were being lost in the process of combining the
school. The school newspaper kept the same name, the mascot kept the
same name, and that sort of thing. One of the early issues was how they
were going to select marshals for graduation. And the final solution
there was to have a black marshal and a white marshal. So, they had
co-marshals. Later, or perhaps along about the same time, the other
questions with regard to their trophy case, with regard to the name of
the mascots, and that sort of thing. So, they did change the name of the

Page 4

mascot to something that was not identical with
what they had earlier. I think they kept the same school newspaper and
yearbook titles. So those things which the adults probably hadn't
thought much about, became big issues with the students. Now, shortly
after I came on to the school board, there was a—well, I wouldn't call
it a riot—a disturbance in the hallways in which the black students were
demanding more attention. It occurred on the day that the school was
undergoing its visitation for accreditation. So, we had a lot of
visitors, both black and white-members of the accreditation committee. I
was amused later. There had been—. I had overheard a comment on the part
of one of the junior high school principals, a black principal from
Charlotte and one of the associate superintendents—I think he was an
associate superintendent at the time—from Wilmington, said that kind of
thing would never happen in either of those places. Well, both of them
had more, , serious disturbances over some of the issues. So, our
situation, it was a tense situation. It was not too long before the
assassination, and I'm-I don't know whether it was a year, or a part of
a year, or maybe two years-assassination of Martin Luther King. And the
black communities, I don't know whether you had-well you weren't old
enough to have been around for that occasion-but you probably had a
different kind of situation in Northampton County than you, than we have
had, we had in the Piedmont area. The community—. Well, they had curfews
in Durham, and Charlotte, in

Page 5

Greensboro. And they had
some actual vandalism arising out of some of that tension. Actually, we
had school board meetings in the elementary school over at Northside.
And we had instructions from the chief of police, I reckon. I know it
was the chief of police or the sheriff. We had instructions to lock
ourselves in the building and then to notify him when the school board
meeting was over to provide an escort out of the Northside community.
Things were that tense. Now, I don't know that any of us were really as
frightened of it as the perhaps the authorities were. To be sure, there
was no real problem. In connection with the so called—. Well, in
connection with the disturbance there were a half a dozen or so black
students who had been violent enough to require some discipline, and I
don't remember what it was, but in the process the-. I was elected
school board the same time Howard Lee was elected mayor— so you get a
little better sense of the racial situation in Chapel Hill when you
remember this was happening at the same time. It wasn't white against
black, [there were] I suppose some traditionalist perhaps, on both
sides. We were invited to come to a meeting in the First Baptist Church,
which you may be aware is the black Baptist church on Rosemary Street.
And we, the school board, sat in front of the audience and listened to
the concerns of the black parents and other members of the black
community. It was, it was a little intimidating in that here we were-

Page 6

five blacks, five whites, and one black school board
member looking across an audience that was completely black with no way
out of the room except to go back through the crowd. So, that's a memory
we have of that.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

What sort of things did they ask you?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, they were concerned whether we were being fair and they didn't—.
Well, I can remember the grandmother of one of the children, I reckon
she was the guardian of the child, was making a very impassioned plea
for considerable leniency in dealing with her grandson. It—. I don't
know much more to say about it except to say that it was obvious when
you visited the schools that the black students tended to be on one side
of the cafeteria, and the whites on the other. The same thing was
happening at the university. The polarization of the student body, or
the self-segregation, or whatever you want to call it. They—. My
children, all of them had black friends, usually students that you would
think of as upper middle class students. But, they also were sensitive
to the tenseness of the school situation. There was no, aside from that
one day—. I've forgotten how much damage was done to the building, a
little in the hallways there. From the standpoint of the students there
was still more tension than they were comfortable with. But these were
our older students, our high school aged students. We had two in high
school at the time, and one

Page 7

would have been in the
junior high school, and one in the elementary school.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

And they were—. So they weren't there while the disturbance took place?

SAM HOLTON:

The two that were in high school would have been there. They were, I
think their teachers kind of rounded up as many of the students as they
could and locked themselves in to the classrooms.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

What kind of disturbance was it?

SAM HOLTON:

Milling about, some breaking of glass, and that sort of thing.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

And this was during the school hours?

SAM HOLTON:

During the school hours, during the visitation.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

That's right. So, were you there then?

SAM HOLTON:

No.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Oh.

SAM HOLTON:

We were notified sometime later in the day as school board members that
there had been a disturbance. And we had meetings to see whether there
was anything we could do to calm the situation down. The visit to the
black church was one of the things that was decided to do.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Do you remember what happened to the students that started it?

SAM HOLTON:

Very little. Maybe two or three days suspension, or something of that
sort.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

And this was before the Martin Luther King incident?

SAM HOLTON:

It was about the same time, and I would have to go back to the newspaper
or something and figure out the exact relationship.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Were there also disturbances then?

Page 8

SAM HOLTON:

Not as far as I can remember in the school itself, except the general
tension and the black and white relationships in the general community.
More fear of what might happen than anything that did happen. Chapel
Hill, as I remember, didn't have—. Well, they may have had a march, or
something of that sort. But they didn't have anything that was
particularly threatening. Ninth Street, over in Durham, they had, they
had some plate glass windows broken and that sort of thing. My wife was
taking classes at UNC-G and had trouble leaving (his wife says "Good
luck" and shuts the door), had trouble leaving the campus at UNC-G to
come home, and then had trouble coming home. They had road blocks up to
control; I don't know what they were going to control . Control whatever
needed to be controlled, I suppose. I had a meeting-I didn't know
anything about the curfew in Durham-I had a meeting over in the Hope
Valley area, and went over and knocked on the door of the person I was
supposed to be meeting with, and they peered out of the window, "Didn't
you know there was a curfew on?" I said, "No." He said, "Well, come on
in and we'll have our meeting." Well, then I started back; I had the
same explanation as to why I was moving about with a curfew. And I said,
"Well, I've been to a meeting here, I didn't know about the curfew. And,
I'm going back to Chapel Hill" He said, "Well, go directly." So,

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Do you want to put that down? I don't want you to have to hold

Page 9

it. Do you think it will sit up here? (talking about
the microphone)

SAM HOLTON:

I reckon it would.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

If that becomes a problem

SAM HOLTON:

That doesn't

JENNY MATTHEWS:

So, were there any other problems that you had to address as a school
board member?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, you might do better to see if you can get a hold of the minutes.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

I looked at some of them.

SAM HOLTON:

My recollections are not very clear on that. Basically, the concern we
have had throughout is to avoid neglecting the lower socio-economic
groups, not just the blacks. Though blacks made up most of it in Chapel
Hill. But, in the fact of a university community and a strong emphasis
on college preparation, as to be sure we had programs enough to take
care of people that weren't going on to college. When we developed the
Chapel Hill High School program for the new campus, we had a strong
vocational program in areas like horticulture, and pre-nursing, and
things of that sort, that I think were—well auto-mechanics. The, when
they combined the faculties, the faculties from Lincoln, and the
faculties from Chapel Hill worked very well together and several of the
black teachers were recognized as very strong. R.D. Smith was the man
that

Page 10

usually dealt with the auto-mechanics program
and other vocational programs of that sort. Mrs. Ruth Polk was a very
outstanding home economics teacher. And, went out of her way to set up
programs for black males to develop skills that could be translated to
work in restaurants, and cooks, and things of that sort. The—. Mr. Smith
was the assistant principal of the combined schools, and I'm sure was
very helpful in relating to any problems we had with the black students,
largely with the black males. The males seem to have more problems in
high school than the females anyway. Or their problems are more likely
to be acted out.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

That's probably what it is.

SAM HOLTON:

So, that's a recollection. We probably had more of that sort of problem
than the same student population had at Lincoln. That is black males
getting in trouble with school regulations and that sort of thing. And I
assume that represents some dissonance between the idea of black pride
and the idea of desegregation, and the effort to integrate. But
otherwise, I'm not sure there was any other serious problem. The—. I'm
sure the questions were always raised about achievement gaps and
differences in expectations. Though I doubt those differences were as
great as some of the white parents thought they were. You have to
remember, you are not just desegregating, integrating the school, you
are also integrating the parental view of the world.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

So, were there immediate achievement gaps?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, yes. I think what you have to think about the achievement

Page 11

gaps Achievement gaps were more related to parent
education levels, and social class, rather than to ethnicity. So, you
probably had achievement gaps that included whites as well as blacks,
but the basic educational level of most of the black community was not
he same as basic education level of the white community. So, you were
going to have, yes, you were going to have that disparity. And you can
have a pretty well desegregated school system, and the fact of
desegregation in terms of ethnicity isn't going to solve your
achievement gaps that are based on other cultural and economic
circumstances. Now, I think simplistically, we just assume this is a
persistent effort to deal only with white students. If anything the
school board and the faculty were leaning over backwards for that not to
be the case. The achievement gaps were largely cultural and
sociological.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

What measures did the school board and faculty take?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, of course you depend on your superintendent and your instructional
staff to do the things they need to do in trying to rectify any
differences that are occurring. Now, I think we've had a very concerned
staff and faculty along those lines. Now, aside from the efforts to be
sure that we were providing attractive programs for both blacks and
whites. For instance, we had a Black Gospel Choir very early in things,
because there was a student demand for it. It was something they had at
Lincoln. Where very few whites were interested in it, but .. get one or
two.

Page 12

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Do you know how that got started?

SAM HOLTON:

I expect by students themselves asking some faculty member to sponsor
it. I don't even remember who sponsored it. I don't remember whether it
was a black teacher or a white teacher, or whether it was just somebody
in the music department that wanted to do it. It may have, on the other
hand, it may have been one of those things where the faculty or
principal said, "Well, we've got to find extracurricular activities for
our whole population, and this is essentially a segregated activity, but
it's self-segregated." If you're going to say you can organize any kind
of club you want to organize as long as it is, isn't too exclusive. So
that anybody that wants to join can join. I don't know how else you can
do it.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

How was achievement determined then? Were there tests?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, it would be the same. As far as class achievement—. Well, you've
got-now we have statewide testing programs that make it relatively easy
to identify who is doing well and what the gaps are. They had
achievement testing, and I don't remember what. There again, you'd have
to go back to school records to find out. But, I don't think there was
any question that there was a larger proportion of the low-income
population that were having difficulties. Though the schools had had
probably the smallest drop-out rate in the state for some time. Back in
the, back when I was on the school board, I had

Page 13

been teaching courses in secondary education and expressing concerns
about the drop-out rates, and the superintendent said, "Well, you're
talking about somebody else." He says, "our drop our rate at that time
was maybe five percent." So, whereas in Yanceyville, where I had been,
between the first grade and the twelfth grade, you dropped off
seventy-five percent of your population, or between the fifth grade and
the twelfth grade, you'd drop out. Same thing would have been true in
Northampton County, in 1950, 1955. But—. So, we didn't have a large
drop-out problem, but the drop-out problem was always with the students
who were doing less well, which typically was the lower socio-economic
group. I had a number of graduate students do dissertations on school
persistence. And, in fact, one of them pointed out, one of the
dissertations pointed out, that if a sibling finished high school, the
odds were much higher that the younger siblings would finish. If the
parents had finished high school, the odds were pretty high, were
exceedingly high, that the children would finish high school. If the
parents had gone to college, the odds were pretty good the students, the
children were going to go college. So that, here again, these studies,
most of them, most of the dissertations I worked on there were, were
prior to desegregation. So, you have an achievement gap any time that
you have a large disparity between the social levels, the educational
levels, the economic opportunities within the population. Now, you got a
reasonably homogeneous population, as

Page 14

you might
find in let's say Iowa, then that is less true, because basically the
whole community has about the same education level. Now, it's not
necessarily very high, but it is similar. Whereas in our setting, the,
or in any semi-urban area, you've got a wide disparity, economically
between the haves and the have-nots, and educationally, it follows
somewhat the same pattern. So, it's a more complex kind of a problem
than to simply say it is the result of blackness or whiteness. Now, I
suppose it is convenient to recognize that as long as there is that
disparity between the black population and white population, that there
is going to be some tendency to re-segregate along other lines. But, I
think that the proposition that the blacks were here and the whites were
here is not totally accurate. We did have middle-class blacks, and they
were achieving in either the black school, or in the white school. Now
the number, the proportion of the black graduates of Lincoln for
instance going on to college was probably much smaller than the
proportion of white students going from Chapel Hill High to college.
Part of that represents the fact that we are in a University community
and the principal employer is the University. So, the proportion of
parents who went on to college was much greater. Now, whether that would
have been true in Yanceyville, and I assume in Northampton County—. The
only college graduates in Yanceyville was the professional classes: the
lawyers—well it's the county-seat town, so the lawyers—the doctor, the
people that worked, the school nurse, and the people that worked

Page 15

for the county, the school teachers, and that
pretty well did it. The principal—. Well, the owner of the Ford Motor
Company for instance, had never been to college. Now, he was a
relatively wealthy person and very supportive of schooling, but he was
also an older man who had gotten started in business in an era in which
college education was not particularly important. His wife-he had
married the school teacher. It's an interesting all right, I don't know
if I've taken care of that question for you.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Yeah. Well, I was going to ask how did the tracking and ability grouping
play out before they were desegregated, and afterwards?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, the amount of tracking, it was true when I was in high school, you
had a college preparatory curriculum, and you had a vocational
curriculum, and you had a general curriculum. Now the college
preparatory—and they tended to be hierarchical—the college preparatory
was for the brighter students, the vocational program was for those that
were bright enough so that the vocational ed folks thought they could do
something with them, and the general tended to be those that just didn't
want to be bothered with the Latin, or the Algebra, or whatever, French,
whatever was in the, Physics, whatever was in the college preparatory
curriculum. Which was part of the problem we had in Yanceyville. We had
a ten-teacher high school, and we didn't have a large enough high school
to offer much other than the college preparatory curriculum. So,
students who didn't want that Now, we did have, we had vocational
agriculture, and we had

Page 16

vocational home economics.
So, the people who really wanted to graduate from high school and have
something in the way of a skill, could stay in and do it. And we had a
fair number, though many of those were planning to plan to go on to
college. But in terms of just—. Well, if you are going with ten
teachers, you are going to offer enough college preparatory work to get
your students into Carolina, or Duke, or Wake Forest. You are going to
have to offer Physics, you are going to have to offer Chemistry. Now,
you offered them on alternate years in order to conglomerate enough
students to justify it. You had to offer Algebra II, you had to offer
two years of Spanish. The decision was made on what kind of teacher you
could find. If the teacher had just resigned had been teaching Spanish,
and they already had Spanish I, you looked real hard for somebody that
could teach Spanish II. Now if the last year you offered was Spanish II,
you could take either a French or a Spanish teacher. But, she had to be
able to teach English or Social Studies, or something else. So, that was
part of the explanation. It's a chicken and eggs proposition. If you
haven't got an elaborate program for them, why stay in school? If they
don't stay in school, how can you offer the program? So, it was—. Now we
didn't have that problem in Chapel Hill, because we had a large enough
population. And the Chapel Hill curriculum followed very much the same
pattern. It had changed in the twenty years between the time I got out
of high school and got on to the school board. But, it was essentially
the same kind of program. Probably not too different from the one you
had in . How many students in your high school?

Page 17

JENNY MATTHEWS:

I think in my graduating class, there were 113.

SAM HOLTON:

Well, that's not—. That's a nice size school.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Well, and then in freshmen class, was like three hundred.

SAM HOLTON:

Well, you see there. There is the same, same thing is working.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

So, do you think that when the schools were desegregated, the black
children were automatically put in the

SAM HOLTON:

No, I don't think so. They were put in the programs they were, their
parents were willing to have them take. There was no effort to segregate
them.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

So, they were free to choose?

SAM HOLTON:

They were free to choose. Now, my son was very much interested in
auto-mechanics, and he went into the auto-mechanics program. And I think
there was one other white student in that program, but that wasn't any
decision made by the school board. That was, sort of self-selection. And
I don't, I think

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

SAM HOLTON:

There may have been one that had been offered in the Lincoln High School
and had not been available at Chapel Hill High School because they
hadn't had enough demand for it.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

You mentioned before that Dr. Cody, the superintendent—?

SAM HOLTON:

Yes.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Was a good superintendent? Do you have any other comments?

Page 18

SAM HOLTON:

No, he was very—. He went from here to Birmingham. And I suspect he got
that job because he had done a good job here and they were recognizing
that they had some desegregation problems that needed to be worked on. I
don't know that. I am hypothesizing there.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Do you know of any specific decisions that he made?

SAM HOLTON:

No, no. Nothing that—. Generally, he was working to make it work. I
couldn't identify anything particular. I'm sure, I'm sure he was urging
his principals and his staff to do the right thing and that sort of
thing. But, I don't think they needed much urging.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

And Dr. Robert Hanes followed him?

SAM HOLTON:

Yes.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

How was he?

SAM HOLTON:

Bob is a good old friend of mine. He and I had taught together when I
first came to the University, and he was a graduate assistant, and I was
a new instructor. Bob was probably one of the two or three best
superintendents in the state. And we were very fortunate to be able to
keep him as long as we did.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Do you know where he is now?

SAM HOLTON:

He is in Charlotte. He is retired, but he is very active. He comes up
here for the football games. He and his wife were both alumni.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

And brought Dr. Charles Rivers here?

SAM HOLTON:

Yes.

Page 19

JENNY MATTHEWS:

He was the person I interviewed first.

SAM HOLTON:

Yes.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

How was that? What did you think about him?

SAM HOLTON:

He's a very fine person. Somewhat quiet, but Charles did a good job. He
was working largely with curriculum issues. Though, Dr. Hanes was a
strong person in curriculum himself.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

How did the community, and specifically the white community, react to
Dr. Rivers coming?

SAM HOLTON:

I had no—. The part of the community that I was with had a lot of
respect for him. He and his wife were both very fine members of the
community. They had two sons who were delightful young men.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

One of my colleagues in my class is studying the dynamics of the school
board through the late sixties and seventies. Could you talk about that
at all? About how the decisions were made?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, most of the decisions were made with split votes. But, I don't
remember what they were splitting over. Usually, it may have been just
typically an academic, a bunch of academics that had strong opinions
about whatever happens to be the issue at hand. But, they—. There was
never any degree of disagreement within the board that was likely, for
instance to want to fire a superintendent or anything of that sort.
There were more issues over, well for instance, the location of the
Ephesus Road Elementary School. The school board had bought the land for

Page 20

the school when Mr., Dr. Johnson was
superintendent, with the idea that the land would—. And Estes Hills were
pretty well filling up, and we were going to need another elementary
school, and closing the Northside School was part of that situation.
Now, the Northside School was, on the one hand was a, had started off as
a private effort on the part of Negro citizens—and that was a term they
were using at the time, I'm not reverting -to provide more for their
children than was otherwise available for them. And then when, I reckon
in the thirties when the state took over all of the school
systems-before that, each school district had been somewhat independent,
and it had an independent tax. In other words, Chapel Hill would have a
school district, and Carrboro would have a school district, and White
Cross would have a school district, and that black school would have a
school district and that sort of thing. Well, when they, when the state
took over in the thirties, and part of it was that most of these school
districts were going broke, the depression just wiped them out. So, when
the state took over the school systems, things got tightened up a little
bit, and I think it was about that stage that the Northside School was
essentially taken over as a part of the Chapel Hill School District.
Now, I may be wrong. It may have occurred in the twenties instead of the
thirties, but it was sometime within the twentieth century and probably
in the mid-twenties or mid-thirties. It was built on a very small site,
a very hilly site. If you want to see how it would be to try to get an
adequate size school building on that site, you can go

Page 21

look at it. But the school board decided that the building
was not adequate in size or in location. All right, then when, if we are
going to build a new elementary school, are we going to build it on that
site? Now, the other problems of that site is that there is only one
road into it and that is Church Street off of Franklin Street. You can't
turn a school bus around in Church Street. And you couldn't turn more
than one bus around on school property and have a string of other buses.
In order to get a second entrance, you would have had to have built a
bridge across Airport Road. And that didn't seem very feasible. Well,
there was one segment of the school board that was bound and determined
that we were going to build a school on that site.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Who were they?

SAM HOLTON:

I don't want to call names.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Oh.

SAM HOLTON:

And

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Was this in the interest of the black community?

SAM HOLTON:

Well, I don't think it was as much an interest of the black community as
it was an interest of the liberal white community, of the very liberal
white community. I think of myself as a member of the liberal community,
but there was a group that were supers. Well, if we had decided in the
desegregation proposition to maintain a black-white ratio that was
within 5 percent of each other. All right, now, if we had built a school
on the Northside site, and let's say

Page 22

the black
population of the time I think was about a quarter. It may have been
twenty percent, but it was on that order. You would have had to build a
school big enough-you want an elementary school to have five or six
hundred children. All right, let's say you would have had to bring
in—let's say we use the six hundred figure—and figure well, a quarter of
those would have been a 150. You would have been busing white children
into the black community, and black children out of the Northside
community to go to some other school, and that didn't seem to make
sense. So, the vote to build Ephesus Road School was four-three.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

And you voted for that?

SAM HOLTON:

I voted for it. There wasn't any, there was no logic to building back on
the Northside proposition, except just the sentimental concern. Now,
what we did do was to arrange that the school buildings, we had one
relatively good building there—the other, the older one wasn't even that
good—would be used for community purposes. In other words, we weren't
bulldozing a school in the middle of the black community. And it became
the site of the Senior Center, the first Senior Center, which was
largely a black Senior Center. Now, thesome of the welfare offices were
there. There were a number of services that were appropriate to that
particular neighborhood. But, the idea of trying to build a school on
that site, just logistically didn't make sense. Well, nobody remembers
it now. They—. When we got ready to work out our attendance districts
the questions

Page 23

were raised about which black
community would come into this school. Well, the Ephesus Road community
was obviously, the whites were likely to be upper middle class. You
didn't necessarily, while the closest black students were the housing
development off of Estes Drive. They, one of the blacks pointed out, he
said, "Look, don't create this disparity by bringing housing development
students in on top of an upper middle class community. Let's find some
blacks that are middle class to bring in to that situation, and you can
have some of the others, but don't load them in to that situation."
Well, this made sense, and we worked it out actually. What you ended up
doing trying to work out your desegregation—. Your black population
lived there at the end of Chapel Hill and the beginning of Carrboro-far
end of Rosemary Street going toward Carrboro, the far end of Franklin
Street, the area around the railroad siding there, represented most of
the black population. Well, what you ended doing was sort of doing a pie
shape kind of situation, so you were busing. Now, this was an issue in
the black community, and yet, neither we nor the leadership of the black
community could figure out really what to do about it. If you are
committed to the proposition that you don't want more than 10 or 15
percent of your population to be black, you want a chance to get them
integrated. You don't want people, you don't want the whites to begin to
move in to the areas where there was a low proportion of blacks. As long
as it was 15, 20, 25 percent, the whites could learn, learn to live with
it. If it got to be 75 percent.

Page 24

JENNY MATTHEWS:

White flight?

SAM HOLTON:

White flight. The elementary school I attended in Durham is now 95
percent black. Now, there is still a lot of white families within
walking distance of the school. I say there are a lot, I don't think
there are a lot. I think those houses are now occupied essentially by
middle-aged people who don't have children in school. But the reason may
relate to the population of the elementary school. But we haven't solved
that problem yet. But Chapel Hill has been right successful in—. Every
time now, it's a concern. Charlotte is having a discussion right now,
over just this issue: why do they have to continue to have what looked
to them like racial quotas to keep their schools desegregated? And the
people on the school board know very well why they have to. Otherwise
they are going to revert to a segregation pattern. And, it's a—. So,
Chapel Hill is—. A person coming to Chapel Hill can be reasonably
satisfied that the instructional programs and the quality of the
program, the student population, proportions of the population that
represent disproportionate needs for attention. In other words, I think
a lot of the people—. You have to think through that you're not saying
that you don't want quality programs for the blacks. What you are
wanting to say is you want quality programs for the black, and you want
them the opportunity to operate in a desegregated, if not yet integrated
environment. And that a parent coming to Chapel Hill is—. The Carrboro
Schools are no worse or better than Ephesus Road, or Glenwood, or Estes
Hills. But it is a fight every time we get ready to desegregate, I mean
to—what is the word I was using while ago? To

Page 25

redistrict.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Could you talk about Ed Caldwell's part on the board?

SAM HOLTON:

Ed was a very important member of the board. The first place, he was an
alumnus of Lincoln High School; he was a leader in the black community.
He had his; he was trusted by the black community. This is the other
side of the coin. We could depend on him knowing what the community
wanted, and the black community could depend on him to see that we
understood what they wanted. So, he was an ideal member of the board. A
very effective one.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Was Peachie Wicker on the board when you were there?

SAM HOLTON:

Yes she was.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

What was her role?

SAM HOLTON:

I'd rather not talk about all of my colleagues.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

I understand.

SAM HOLTON:

Peachie is a good friend of mine. We frequently voted on different sides
of issues.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

And was Mary Scroggs the chairman then?

SAM HOLTON:

Mary Scroggs was the chairman. Mary was probably the best school board
chairman of the state at the time. She is a well-informed person. She is
a skillful chairperson. She, she devoted a tremendous amount of time and
energy to it. She was working at the University at the time. Her husband
was a faculty member, and she was a significant administrator over in
the Physics Department. But, she put in a tremendous amount of time and
energy into the

Page 26

school board. When the county
commissioners would discuss their budget, she would-and budget hearings
are all supposed to be open-she would be sitting on the front row with
her knitting, so they would be aware that they couldn't run down the
school budget without her awareness they were running it down. She—. If
some question was raised as to why we need this in Chapel Hill, in
Chapel Hill Schools, she intended to be there to say why we needed it.
And she was a leader in the State School Board Association, and she was
a very skillful chairman. She could handle a split board and keep
everybody moving on target. Call down somebody if they really need to be
called down in a very nice way.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

How many—. What were the dates that you were on the board?

SAM HOLTON:

19—. I think it was 1968, may have been, yeah, I think it was 1968 to
74.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Was Norman Weatherly—?

SAM HOLTON:

Norman Weatherly was on the board. Norman was a very conscientious
school board member. No, the problem I had with Mrs. Wicker and Mrs.
Denny.

JENNY MATTHEWS:

Who was that?

SAM HOLTON:

Mrs. Denny, Betty Denny. Was that, they were, they seemed to me likely
to go off on what I thought of as a tangent. And, so they were both very
nice people. And as I say, they were very good friends of mine. We just
didn't always agree on the school board. I think they were—. James
Howard was the other board member when we were in the process of voting
to build the